Fur claw
| Fur claw | ||||||||||
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Fur rail ( Gallirallus lafresnayanus ) |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||
| Gallirallus lafresnayanus | ||||||||||
| J. Verreaux & Des Murs , 1860 |
The fur rail ( Gallirallus lafresnayanus ), also known as the New Caledonia wood rail , is a large brown flightless or almost flightless rail that was made famous by 17 specimens caught between 1860 and 1890 in New Caledonia and on the nearby Île des Pins .
features
It is almost 46 cm long and has a long, curved beak. The tail is less good, the wings more developed than that of the Lord Howe wood rail ( Gallirallus sylvestris ), and it has fluffier, more worn plumage.
The top of the rail is dark gray and merges into the chocolate brown of the rear neck, the reins are dark brown. It has an over-the-eye stripe of lighter brown. The cheeks and throat are light gray, the ear covers brown. The back has a washed-out brown-gray color, which changes to olive on the shoulders and black-brown towards the rump. The underside is dark gray and turns into a faded brown on the chest. The flanks and under tail coverts are chocolate brown.
The young birds have an orange-brown spot on the front neck and differ from the adult birds in that their backs and necks are almost black, the slate-black underside and slate-gray throat and head.
Way of life
The rail is a nocturnal bird that moves very agile and fast. It breeds in depressions in the ground and presumably feeds on various invertebrates.
They probably inhabited evergreen forests that had ecological requirements similar to those of the Kagu . The birds were historically observed from sea level up to 1000 m, but today's observations only come from inaccessible mountain forests. This is probably due to the fact that there are fewer introduced predators there.
Whether the rail still exists today is unclear because the last reliable evidence of the bird dates back to 1890, but unconfirmed observations of the bird were repeatedly reported in the 1960s and 1984. It is therefore conceivable that the rail has survived in inaccessible mountain forests in small numbers.
swell
- ↑ a b c Gallirallus lafresnayanus in the endangered Red List species the IUCN 2008. Posted by: BirdLife International, 2008. Accessed on 2 February, 2009.
- ↑ Trevor H. Worthy: The fossil rails (Aves: Rallidae) of Fiji with descriptions of a new genus and species; Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand Volume 34, Number 3, September 2004, pp. 295-314
- ↑ a b c Eberhard Mey: Psittacobrosus bechsteini: a new extinct featherling (Insecta, Phthiraptera, Amblycera) from the three-colored macaw Ara tricolor (Psittaciiformes), together with an annotated overview of fossil and recently extinct animal lice. Number Ver. Thuringia. Ornithole. 5 (2005) 201 no. Ver. Thuringia. Ornithole. 5, 201-217. December 2005
- ^ Storrs L. Olson: A CLASSIFICATION OF THE RALLIDAE. THE WILSON BULLETIN December 1973 Vol. 85, No. 4th
- ↑ a b c Dieter Luther: The extinct birds of the world. 4th edition, unchanged reprint of the edition from 1986. Magdeburg: Westkarp-Wiss and Heidelberg: Spektrum Akad. Verlag. 1995